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git Thunderbird Synching

Subject: git Thunderbird Synching

## tl;dr

2 messages between Jan 14, 2009 and Jan 14, 2009.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Nicholas LaRoche· Jan 14, 2009, 07:52 UTC · lore

Has anyone tried to synch a Thunderbird profile between two computers with git?

I want to do something like this with my main profile, but I'm concerned that if I send/receive email on either machine independently that there will be corruption in some of the files when I push back to my main box.

Regards, Nick

Sitaram Chamarty· Jan 14, 2009, 16:01 UTC · re: Nicholas LaRoche · lore

Re: git Thunderbird Synching

On 2009-01-14, Nicholas LaRoche <nlaroche@vt.edu> wrote:
> I want to do something like this with my main profile, but I'm concerned 
> that if I send/receive email on either machine independently that there 
> will be corruption in some of the files when I push back to my main box.

The mbox files making up the actual mail are probably safe enough, assuming you do the git operations with TB shut down, not running. In effect, each message is one chunk of code, and you're basically deleting or adding them. Ugly, but it would probably work.

But I expect serious trouble with the MSF files that TB maintains, symptoms being quick searches not working or showing something in the message list pane and some other unrelated message in the preview pane.

And that's if you can get git to merge them in the first place -- which I very much doubt. For all practical purposes they're binary blobs.

So if you don't care about the MSF at all and can rebuild them each time, this would work.

Otherwise IMAP is a better option :-)

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